A top Obama campaign official on Wednesday accused Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich of making “abysmal” and “despicable” comments when they charged that President Barack Obama was being racially divisive in his response to the killing of Trayvon Martin.

“The president took a question the other day in the Rose Garden and he spoke from the heart in empathizing with parents who lost a son in a very tragic incident,” Stephanie Cutter, an a deputy manager of Obama’s reelection campaign, told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien. “I think it’s abysmal, despicable, that people like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum are trying to make this a divisive issue.”

Obama weighed in last Friday on Martin’s shooting, calling it a national tragedy, and saying that the young man reminded him of his own children. “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” Obama said at the time.

In an interview with Sean Hannity last week, Gingrich called them “disgraceful.”

“Is the President suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot that would be ok because it didn’t look like him?” Gingrich asked Hannity, adding: “That’s just nonsense dividing this country up. It is a tragedy this young man was shot.”

Santorum accused Obama of “pouring gas on our racial fire.” “It’s clear the president has been not a uniting figure on an issue that, I think many Americans thought he would be,” Santorum said on Scott Hennen’s radio show.

Cutter, during her interview with O’Brien, added: “On the campaign trail, on their last desperate hopes, as they’re moving through the primary process they should watch their own words.”

Meanwhile, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) Wednesday also called Martin’s death a “hate crime.”

“An investigation must go on. The Justice Department must be on the ground - they’ve got to be involved with this. There are too many unanswered questions and I really personally believe this is a hate crime,” she said on CNN.

She added: “The evidence really points to a fact that you had a gung ho so-called neighborhood watchman who wanted to be a cop, basically, who was following a young black man who was unarmed and had committed no crime. That’s pretty stiff evidence that this is possibly a hate crime.”